“If Lawrence doesn’t drink tea, why would he steal it?” I asked.
“Spitefulness.”
“You know, I thought you wanted to stay out of sight,” I said. If I kept repeating this, Cynthia would eventually respond.
“I did,” said Cynthia. “I came up the fire escape and thought I would just slip in. I appreciate you smuggling out my things the other day, but I’m afraid you just didn’t do as good a job at it as I would have liked.” Then Cynthia’s face reddened, as if she had made an inconsiderate remark. Although, I didn’t take it that way at all.
“It was my fault to try to farm it out to you, of course. I should have come back in here myself. I was just afraid it would be strange. Although, now that I’m here, it doesn’t seem strange at all. It frankly doesn’t even feel like I was fired. It feels like I never left.”
“This place is on fire without you,” I said honestly.
“It was on fire with me,” said Cynthia. “That’s the danger of naming a company after a doomed flower.”
“It thought it was a river,” I said, remembering that I heard that somewhere.
“It’s a flower on a river. The Cahaba lily is only found there. I’ve been there actually—canoeing with a friend. The blooms only last a single day before they wilt. Central Alabama—it’s beautiful country.”
“You went there with Joyce?” I asked, and Cynthia, I noted, ducked the question.
“It’s just like this place,” she said. “Beautiful while it lasted. Now it’s all wilting.”
“So it is,” I said, privately wondering if she knew about the sale.
“Let me know if you run across my tea.”
“Stay out of sight,” I told her.
I found Vanetta and Charice hiding in Archie’s office, of all places. I probably would not have noticed either of them, save for the train on Charice’s wedding dress, which lingered out from behind Archie’s desk like toilet paper trailing from a leg. With metaphors like that, I should write for Brides magazine, I know.
“Are you actually crouched and hiding behind a desk?” I asked. “Has it come to this?” This question was posed to Charice, who I did not need to create extra problems in this moment. However, the voice that came from behind the desk was actually Vanetta’s.
“She’s not hiding. I’m hiding.”
Charice chimed in. “I wouldn’t say that I wasn’t also hiding. I’m somewhat hiding. But I could have made a better go of it if I really put my heart into it.”
This was undoubtedly true.
I walked around to the other side of the desk, and sure enough there were Vanetta and Charice sitting cross-legged on the floor. It was so casual, and so friendly-looking that I half expected there to be a bong involved. Or at least some kind of incense.
“Sit down,” said Charice.
“There’s kind of a crisis out there,” I told them.
“Sit down.”
I sat down because Charice, when she really puts her heart into something, is hard to stop. Also, despite the impression she gives off, she’s also whip smart, so when she wants something, it’s also worth considering that maybe you should want it too.
“What are you guys doing down here?”
“I was having a brief mental breakdown,” said Vanetta. “But I think I’ve recovered.”
“You shouldn’t let things build up so much,” said Charice.
“The trick is that I don’t have time for a proper mental breakdown,” said Vanetta. “I have to focus it; like a power nap.”
“Do you know the police are here?” I asked. This is certainly the sort of question that would help someone on the cusp of a mental breakdown.
“No,” said Vanetta. “I did not. Are they just running around out there?”
“They’re in your office,” I said. “They want to speak to you.”
I don’t know why I was pluralizing Detective Tedin here. It was, after all, just him. Not that this made a lick of difference to Vanetta.
“Well, we can just line them up after Ignacio.”
“Ignacio has been roofied,” I said. I wasn’t even trying to be helpful at this point, and I could see how this would not make me a very good secretary.
Vanetta took this, of all news, pretty well, and was merely tsking about it. “It’s Lawrence’s damned roofie supply, isn’t it? Of course it is. Why wouldn’t it be? Another way Lawrence is ruining my life.”
I did not think this was a tsking matter, but given her attitude, I suppose Vanetta had come to terms with Lawrence’s drug collection. I don’t suppose this meant that she did it?
“You didn’t drug Lawrence?” I asked.
“No,” said Vanetta.
“Hmm,” I said.
“Dahlia,” said Charice, who was surprisingly scolding. “You’re coming in here and interrupting with your detective stuff when Vanetta and I were having a real human-to-human moment.”
It seemed bizarre to me, even amid the usually bizarre life of Charice Baumgarten, that she would be having a human-to-human moment on the floor with Vanetta Jones.
“What are you having a moment about?” I asked.
“She was telling me about her problems,” said Charice. “And I was telling her about my problems, and as it happened, they sort of overlap.”
“You don’t have problems,” I told Charice.
“Of course I have problems,” said Charice. “Being alive means having problems.”
Yes, but Charice’s problems were, I imagined, things like “How do I keep this ice sculpture from melting before the party ends?” and “Why is it so hard to find really good weed?” The places that this would overlap with Vanetta’s problems, which involved financial ruin, a mystery father, and angry police—it seemed hard to imagine.
“I don’t have time for this,” I said.
“You think I do?” asked Vanetta.
“I’m getting married in an hour,” said Charice.
“Who else knew about Lawrence’s roofie collection?” I asked.
“Who knows,” said Vanetta. “Archie, I assume. I mean, Archie is the person from whom he got them, I’d imagine. Oh, and Gary.”
“He got them from Archie and Gary?”
“No, Gary also knew about them.”
Either way, this statement seemed baffling to me, because Gary was not the sort of person you would share drug stories and adventures with. He was a grown-ass man, with a baby and a wife. Also, I didn’t think Lawrence had acknowledged him directly in all the time I had been there.
“Why Gary?”
“He roofied Gary one day,” said Vanetta. “As a joke. That was the day our last Human Resources person left. Just walked up and left, laughing as she went out the door.”
This was a lot of information to digest. I could envision Gary, sprawled out at his desk, and I could envision Lawrence, laughing at it.
“Are you going to deal with the police?” I asked.
“Yes,” said Vanetta. “Give me five minutes to make my peace with God. I just never expected everything would go up in flames like this.”
“That’s what you get for naming your company after an ephemeral flower,” I said.
“That damned flower metaphor. Where did that even come from? It’s named for the shower in the bathroom.”
“What?”
“There’s a shower here. But no bath. And when we started the company together, Lawrence and I were sharing an apartment at this place that only had a shower too. So we named it Can’t Have Baths Apps.”
“And you decided it was too long and you shortened it to Ca Ha Ba,” I said.
“No,” said Vanetta. “We never thought it was too long. It was just that the name was already taken. Can you believe that? There’s a Can’t Have Baths film development company in Burbank. So we shortened it.”
I sort of assume that Vanetta was joking about the name being taken, but she did not look or sound like someone who was joking, so who knows? Life is strange sometimes, and never in
the ways you expect.
“It was Cynthia who told me about that,” I said.
“Figures,” said Vanetta. “That woman is wrong about everything.”
“Are you done badgering this poor woman with questions?” asked Charice.
“Just one last one,” I said. “Have you seen Archie?”
And then, as if on cue, “The Lady in Red” began to play again.
I don’t mean to pick on Chris de Burgh, composer and performer of the venerable ’80s hit “The Lady in Red.” But I was at this moment harboring a strong theory that he was somehow an agent of Satan, or perhaps even Satan himself. Even now, it seems not entirely unreasonable to think that after I die, if I’ve lived a bad life, I will hear the dulcet tones of “The Lady in Red” greeting me as I enter the gates of hell.
“I’ll talk to Archie,” I said.
“I’ll go see the police.”
When I got out into the main room, I saw that Quintrell and Gary were taking apart the walls of the Herman Miller cubicle system and were now re-forming it into something else.
“We’re building a Lemarchand’s box,” said Quintrell. “Out of Herman Miller pieces.”
Reader, I will freely admit that I did not know what a Lemarchand’s box was. I assumed it was some sort of fancy math thing, but after asking, I learned that it is, in fact, the evil puzzle box from the Hellraiser movies. Clive Barker, your legacy lives on, albeit in temporary office furniture form.
“You do that,” I said. “I’m going to deal with the music.”
Vanetta ran to her office—literally she was running, just as Ignacio and Daniel sputtered out of the bathroom, whereupon Ignacio collapsed on the floor.
“I’m doing the best I can, Dahlia,” said Daniel. “But he’s slippery!”
“I’ve figured out who you really are, Dahlia Moss!” said Ignacio, who was just sort of hemorrhaging for the door.
“Grab his legs!” I said, and ran down the stairs to stop the music.
Deb was outside, smoking. I’m not even sure if she worked at the dog-grooming place at all, now—she might just have been some sort of smoldering gargoyle.
“What happened?” I asked Deb.
The question was salient because there was no banner. And no Archie. Just a speaker.
“What happened with what?” asked Deb, exhaling one gloriously long stream at me.
She was putting me on.
“With the music?” I submitted.
“Oh, that,” she said. “I only caught the end of it, when the girl ran off.”
“What girl?” I asked.
“Some skinny white girl in a teal dress. I only caught the back of her. Real cute, though.”
Who the hell was she talking about?
“There was a girl?” I asked.
“That’s what I said,” said Deb.
“It wasn’t Cynthia Shaffer.”
“I’d call her a woman,” considered Deb.
“She wasn’t black?” I asked.
“Nope,” said Deb.
“Was her name Adalbjorg?” I asked, stabbing about as blindly as a person can.
“Dunno,” said Deb.
“If you see her again,” I said, “stop her.”
“I’m not gonna do that,” said Deb.
And then I turned off the music and took the boom box. Whoever this girl was, she was going to have to see me in order to get her radio back.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
As I was walking back upstairs, I ran into Masako Ueda. I was, at this point, basically insane and careening out of control, and Masako was exactly as calm as she is in every circumstance. This was both a comfort and a consternation. Mostly the latter, but I do take pleasure in the unchanging.
“Dahlia,” said Masako flatly.
“Masako,” I said not at all flatly. “Don’t go upstairs. Everything is horrible up there. There are two drugged men, one of whom who is naked and missing, a journalist, a police detective asking questions, and two insane and vengeful engineers who are doing unspeakable things with the furniture.”
Masako simply continued walking up the stairs at the same pace as before and said: “I’m having lunch with Tyler.”
“Yes, but,” I said, “maybe you don’t want to go up there.”
“I don’t want to wait downstairs,” said Masako. “It smells like dog.”
“Okay. But it could be crazy in there if the police get free. Also—you didn’t by any chance play the eighties hit ‘The Lady in Red’ on a speaker system downstairs?”
“No,” said Masako.
Masako opened the door.
And just like that, the situation went from being metaphorically on fire to literally on fire. A pyre of cubicles was in the middle of the room and there were literal—not metaphorical—flames coming from it.
“We didn’t mean to!” said Quintrell.
“We didn’t start the fire,” started Gary, normally, and then gradually turning into, if not song, at least spoken poetry. “It was always burning, since the world was turning!”
“No,” said Quintrell. “You did. You literally started the fire when you threw those Christmas candles at it.”
“It was for luck!” said Gary.
I was going to ask—against all logic—if there was tea near the Christmas candles—but was interrupted by Tyler, leaping from his office with a fire extinguisher and spraying the burning box of office furniture.
Vanetta and Detective Tedin also ran from their office.
“What the HELL is happening here?” Vanetta screamed. “I leave you alone for two minutes and this is the shit you pull—”
“They’re going to sell Cahaba, Vanetta,” said Quintrell.
“What?”
“DE is selling the company. They’re taking the Peppermint Planes IP and they’re going to make us do hidden puzzle games!”
“What?!”
Vanetta was, as they say on the Internet, SHOOK.
“Did you know about this, Tyler?” asked Vanetta, and the question was sharp enough to cut the air. Honestly, the flames subsided on their own, out of concern for Tyler’s well-being.
“I can’t hear you over this fire extinguisher!” said Tyler.
“Let’s just everyone calm down now,” said Tedin, apparently the voice of reason now that he wasn’t arresting people willy-nilly.
Ignacio Granger escaped from the bathroom yet again, probably to yell out something incriminating to the police, like “I’ve been drugged!” or “That woman is a liar!” but he didn’t get very far because Daniel was pulling him back into the bathroom. The best he managed was an “Aaarrggh!”
“What is going on here, precisely?” asked Detective Tedin, which would have been scary except he was tackled to the ground by Lawrence Ussary.
I will now describe this for you in slow motion, which is how I remember it in my nightmares.
Tedin, who had crossed the room, presumably to get farther away from the flames, was standing in front of the door to the break room, which was closed.
The door opened, silently, or at least silently in comparison to everything else.
Lawrence was not naked, in fact, but was wearing Vanetta’s teal ikat dress from a few days ago, which was just as alarming as you are imagining.
Lawrence knocked down Tedin. Tackled him. I told you earlier that I thought he looked like a 1920s football player for Harvard. He tackled like one too.
Tedin, for his own part, seem astonished that a drugged man in a dress had sneaked behind him and taken him down so easily.
“Stay away from Vanetta!” yelled Lawrence as he was rolling around on the floor with Detective Tedin, who, if he will forgive the phrase, was too old for this shit. “Stay away from Vanetta!”
Cynthia opened the door to Lawrence’s office—having apparently been inside—and said: “I found the tea! It was in his desk drawer the whole time!”
Archie entered, naturally, because why wouldn’t he, with flowers. He did not have a bouquet, b
ut a preposterously large terra-cotta-colored pot, which was filled with marigolds. He saw Vanetta first and said, “Vanetta, these flowers aren’t part of a proposal or anything, but I just wanted to say—”
And then he noticed the smoldering fire, and the CEO in Vanetta’s dress rolling around on the floor with a policeman, and Cynthia, and also Ignacio, who was trying to get out again. He seemed not to know how to take all of this. “What the hell is happening in here?”
The phone was ringing, and I was still the secretary, and so I picked it up. While this was happening, Vanetta walked over and took the flowerpot, then walked back to where Tedin and Lawrence were wrestling on the floor and smashed the pot over Lawrence’s head. However, being cheap plastic, this did nothing except get dirt on the floor.
“I spent eight dollars on that!” said Archie.
“That’s a good price,” said Cynthia. “Where did you get them?”
“Cahaba Apps,” I said into the phone. “Cynthia speaking.”
“How much longer are you going to be in there?” a voice with a Southern accent said. “You’re taking forever.”
“I think I quit,” said Quintrell.
“No quitting,” said Vanetta. “No one can quit! We can still save this!”
“Seriously,” said Gary. “Don’t quit. Make sure you get your benefits. Do you have any idea what it’s like to live without health insurance?”
Lawrence, on the floor, gradually seemed to realize that he had not tackled Archie, but in fact, someone else. “Wait a second,” he said. “You’re not Archie.”
“The hell I’m not,” said Tedin.
“Now that I’ve found that tea,” asked Cynthia, “any chance I could get my five dollars back?”
And then the Herman Miller hellbox collapsed. Perhaps the flames had destroyed its structural integrity; perhaps it had decided that it did not want to live in a world such as this. It was like the lily of the Cahaba River. Beautiful for a moment, and then gone in an instant.
I just sat there for a moment and let all of this chaos wash over me. It was madness—almost Lovecraftian madness—where normal people had too many nights of not sleeping bring them over into a place where it seemed like a good idea to set office furniture on fire.
The Questionable Behavior of Dahlia Moss Page 24